Defining or checking the pdf writer used in publish

I've just started to consider using adobe for my pdf management, I've been using cute exclusively.

There are some subtle differences between viewers, in both tone and definition at different zoom ratios.

I wanted to compare published items between adobe and cute/edge/onboard-Brics.

If I open the Print window there's a large selection of available plotters in "Printer / Plotter configuration", but I can't find the same options for publish. Do I have to set this up via the pagesetup?

I've got 1 sheet I'm comparing the visuals for. The cute pdf 'publish' sheet is 504kb and an adobe 'print' sheet is 190kb, I don't understand the massive file size difference, is it extra metadata from using publish? shouldn't it be smaller if I'm compressing the jpeg reffed file? I can change the dpi/jpeg compression etc in publish but I can't change it in print?

Thx